GOD IS A TRIANGLE // Fri July 28th

“…All things have necessarily flowed, or always follow, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles." Ethics, Benedict Spinoza (IP17S1)

Rooted in Spinozan themes of ontology married with earlier meditations on colour and painting by Benjamin Walter, this series attempts to capture existence and the aesthetic object in painting as pure instantiation of colour and form.

With a banal backdrop, an ode to reality is suggested through a painted spatial arrangement. These familiar settings, these representations of real places in the world, play off an object: an object that is amorphous andundefined insofar as it consists only of shape and colour, nonrepresentational and yet created for the backdrop in question and belonging solely to the painting. The object is rendered to represent a dimensionality that it will never have, within a space that is at once inexorably tied to and unquestionably of a different existential plane from it. In doing so, a visual experience arises that invokes questions of ontology of the art object. The viewer is invited to consider each painting, and paintings as a platform in and of itself, as both a planar surface for which colour and form may reside on and a space with depth that objects may reside within.

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Sandy Di Yu is an emerging Canadian artist currently based in Berlin. Having earned her degree at York University in Toronto, she works largely in paint mediums, collage, and text. Her studies in philosophy in both Toronto and Copenhagen fuels her interest in the intersections between phenomenology and culture as well as the ontology of art and body objects. As such, her art is often premised on the theories espoused by the dead white men of Western philosophical tradition, and the literary works that trickle from this origin.